Thank you, Manley.
Thank you for the opportunity for appearing. I'd like to give you a bit of an overview. I'm much better at answering questions than delivering speeches.
As Manley mentioned, what we have is the demand side support model versus a supply side service model. There's a significant distinction to be made there. We literally have a mantra that all of our field workers live by and that's that we don't start the training machine until the job offer is made. So we literally spend a significant amount of our time in the field. The 6,000 points of contact are real. We travel around, meeting with employers, talking about their needs. Once we identify the needs, then we go back to the unemployed. We know where they are.
We have spent six to seven years developing relationships with all of the service providers, government service providers, in all of the communities around British Columbia. They have prepared the unemployed by doing the resume writing, the job search skills, and what we do is target our supports to the individual and the job in question. Often, that means credentials or certificates, short-term certificates, to allow people to work safely on construction sites. It can often involve a training component. We do a lot of on-the-job training with training agreements.
This isn't a wage subsidy. It's an agreement between the employer and the people they're hiring and we hire people at the full rate for that position in question and then we identify what it's going to take to get that individual's skills up to the point where they're producing at 100% and that's a negotiated process. Because we're construction and trades and apprentice, it often includes a journey person who delivers that training. We actually identify the number of hours and days it will require for that individual. We monitor it, sign off on it, and then that person is brought up to speed and is then, from our perspective, registered as an apprentice in the system. So we do a lot of it. I guess we did become excited about the jobs grant because we saw it as a natural extension of the model we've created.
Another unique aspect of our program is that we don't hire career practitioners. For the most part, we hire tradespeople. These are people who understand our sector, our industry, and the jobs that are involved in it. Then we teach them some skills that involve interviewing, counselling, small “c” counselling. We have an assessment process that we have developed that really outlines.... It's on our website. It's an interactive model that we've created that allows somebody to work through a number of different dimensions of their life to see if they're suitable for this kind of work, and it allows us to target where we put our supports. It can be training or improving working situations on a job site. It can involve tools and equipment. It often involves moving people from one community to another.
We've often referred to our approach as a series of concentric rings. We deal with the local concerns first, giving opportunities locally, then because of our reach across the province, we start going to the next ring, adjacent communities, and mobilizing people to where the needs are.